Oblive/Screamin' Fetus — Death Tape
The tape comes in a small bag that features black & white paper inlay and this features: a picture of the mass suicide site at Jim Jones Jonestown, rev Jones himself, and an African American women holding up a sign the says ‘ I Believe In Jim Jones’- so the theme here is mass cult worship & mass cult death.
So first up we have Oblive tracks, and Side ones ‘wall’ starts off been built around a mid-paced, muddy & tightly wound mixture of airless static jittering & rumbling bass bound juddering. The track has a great obsessive air and seems to press down on you like death heavy sub-tropical air, and one can almost see the bloated & fly buzzing Jonestown suicide victims lying piled up in their tin huts. By around the firth minute what sounds like extremely juddered ‘n’ jittered choral music & dialogue is added to ‘wall’, but it’s very difficult to make out any real detail or structure- but this adds to the tighten & almost deathly surreal feel of the track. These new elements either fall deeper into the tracks, or drop away altogether after a few minutes as the 'wall' seems to get tighter & tighter, and more hacking in its feel. By around the 14th minute things seem to firm up for a meaty rumble ’n’ churn that sounds like some buzzing, huge & distant rotavator that’s hacking ’n’ grinding up human bodies... then the track sudden stops near the 17 minute mark leaving you in a nicely startled silence.
Over onto side two & we have Screamin' Fetus track, and this sides ‘wall’ smashers in with a rough ‘n’ boiling mixture of rushing roars, billows & batterings that are underfed by scraping ‘n’ crisscrossing static grain- it feels like your now inside the huge rotavtor from the end of the first track. By the 3rd minute some of the ‘walls’ tearing ‘n’ ripping harshness has gone, but it’s still ripping along like an over revered run away tractor engine in its brutal rotating wonder. The rest of the track sees SF moving the ‘wall’ between more straight layers of rotating noise, sudden hits of more ragged ‘n’ shredding noise texturing, and in it’s last 5 of so minutes hissing, struggling ‘n’ boiling noise texturing. This side is a hell of a lot more violet & ripping in it’s attack than the first side oppressive brutality, and it makes for a nice constant, and it certainly makes you feel very awake & battered by the end of it.
All told this is a grim, obsessive, brutal yet enjoyable split that sees both parties nicely complimenting each other, and creating brutal ‘n’ grim atmospher for the tapes Jonestown theme.